Hanging Out or Left High and Dry, the Seals Are Back

By COREY KILGANNON

Published: February 29, 2004

On Wednesday morning, Carol Nagy, 33, was walking on a pier at the World's Fair Marina, just north of Shea Stadium, when she spied an unusual visitor lounging on the fuel dock: a young hooded seal basking in the winter sun.

''I've worked here 10 years, and I've never seen a seal,'' said Ms. Nagy, 33, a sales manager for the Skyline Princess, a luxury charter yacht docked at the marina.

The seal gazed across choppy Flushing Bay at a Home Depot store on the opposite shore and seemed oblivious to the roar of traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway and the low-flying planes landing at LaGuardia Airport.

A seal in city waters? Matt Symons, deputy director for the City Parks Department's Urban Park Rangers stared at the seal and said that such sightings had become more common. And local biologists say that seal populations in New York-area waters are rising dramatically after a century of dwindling numbers. Besides a steady increase over the last five years, there is a startling number of sightings and rescue calls this winter, they say. More and more seals can be found on the rocky coasts of Connecticut, lolling on Long Island shoals and loafing on New Jersey beaches. Seal-watching tours are held on Long Island and Connecticut.

''The trends are off the scale right now,'' said Kim Durham, a biologist at the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation on Long Island, referring to seal sightings and calls for rescue. Most calls are for stranded or harp seals, which beach themselves when they are suffering from malnourishment, dehydration, parasite infections or respiratory problems.

The foundation has rescued 26 seals and 4 sea turtles this winter. They are kept in individual tanks for rehabilitation and eventual release, usually within a month or two.

The foundation's director, Robert DiGiovanni, said that in a survey he conducted in a small Cessna airplane one day last month, he counted 700 seals on the East End of Long Island.

From December through May, the waters around the New York area get an influx of four major types of seals -- harbor, harp, gray and hooded seals. The harbor seals, often from the Maine coast, are the most common locally. They have whitish fur with dark spots and grow up to six feet long. The long-snouted gray seal, often from Nantucket, can grow up to seven feet. The harp seals, indigenous to Arctic waters, are silvery with black heads and can grow up to six feet.

''We have seals all over the place this year,'' said Robert C. Schoelkopf, the founding director of the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in Brigantine, N.J. ''It's a real busy year for us,'' he said. ''You have seals up in Connecticut and Long Island, all up and down the coast. We thought it had stabilized this year, but now it's going up again.''

Mr. Schoelkopf said that his small staff had run 80 rescues this winter, possibly his highest total ever by late February. Staff members also rescue dolphins, porpoises and sea turtles.

On Friday, he said, a 53-foot fin whale was rescued in Port Elizabeth. Yesterday, he received a call about a three-foot-long healthy harp seal that had swum 53 miles up the Delaware River. ''It was healthy, but you had people throwing rocks at it and others feeding it sushi,'' he said. ''There were news camera crews shining lights on it. We had to rescue him.''

''You always have people who want to pet or take pictures with them, and that's harassment,'' Mr. Schoelkopf added.

Seal populations around Long Island have increased by 3 to 6 percent annually over the past few years, said Samuel S. Sadove, a biologist who tracks marine mammals on Long Island. This is mostly because the overall seal population has increased in the northwest Atlantic over the last two decades after seals became a protected species in 1972, and environmental awareness among the public increased.

Seals tend to go unnoticed because they seek out unpopulated places, Mr. Sadove said. Seals were plentiful locally a century ago, when schools of dolphins roamed the Long Island Sound and some of the world's best whale hunting was done off Eastern Long Island, he said. But hunting and development of coastal areas decreased populations. Seal numbers dropped further in the 1970's when many died from influenza and in the 1980's, when they were stricken with distemper infection.

''You have to realize that as recently as the 1950's a seal spotted on Long Island was still considered food,'' Mr. Sadove said.

Mr. Sadove said he had done fly-over censuses by plane, and even counted 2,000 seals at one time over one island cluster on the East End. He would not say where exactly, because, ''Public awareness is a double-edged sword.''

''I've seen people swimming out with dogs to haul-out sites near the Montauk Lighthouse,'' he said, ''and I've done walking tours to sites, only to come back and find that it caused the seals to abandon the area.''

Amy Ferland, harbor seal census researcher at the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk, Conn., estimated that there were 3,000 seals in Long Island Sound, and noted increases this winter in areas off the coast of Westchester and Connecticut, including New Rochelle and Stamford. ''We're certainly seeing more species, and there are more sightings,'' she said. ''There are more seals and a greater awareness that they're out there. A lot of people are going out on the tours.''

Photo: A seal basked in the sun recently on a pier at the World's Fair Marina in Flushing, Queens. Sightings of seals are becoming more common. (Photo by Kevin P. Coughlin for The New York Times)